Quill pig is another name for a porcupine. Porcupines are unattractive and unpopular, but, as animals go, and unlike eagles, elephants, and donkeys, they are reasonably harmless good neighbors that mind their own business. Here's where we can talk about being good neighbors and why it's eternally important.

Friday, April 13, 2012

Five Reasons Barack Obama Is Bad News for Black People

The Trayvon Martin case has sparked a loud response from "the black community" (as though blacks are so many chocolate bunnies out of the same mold), one of the loudest of which belongs to President Barack Obama. While I don't know what transpired before the shooting of Mr. Martin, that Mr. Obama would speak so loudly tells me that things are not as he would like me to believe them. Despite his rhetoric, Mr. Obama is no friend of black people, and if he says one thing, people should consider the possibility that its opposite is actually true. This is especially true for blacks, who arguably comprise the most vulnerable ethnic group in our country.

Why should no self-respecting black person trust Barack Obama?

Inflation

Mr. Obama has presided over a huge increase in the supply of digital dollars, "money" backed by nothing but "the full faith and credit of the United States government." Why does this hurt blacks?

Whenever anyone creates "money" out of thin air, either by counterfeiting paper bills, clipping or debasing the metal in coins, or declaring the money into existence using a computer keyboard, the effect is the same: those with immediate access to the new "money" have increased buying power: they can buy goods and services at the old prices. But the more money there is in circulation, the more those at the front of the line can bid prices up, and those at the end of the line, who have to wait for the "money" to trickle down pay higher prices, as do those who do not have access to it at all. Those in the inner circle benefit; everyone else suffers.

Blacks as a group are underrepresented in the inner circle and overrepresented at the end of the line, so they are more likely than whites to face the higher prices caused by inflation with little or no additional new "money" to pay them. Think gasoline: how many blacks are earning today three times what they were earning ten years ago? Yet the price of gasoline has more than tripled, as have the prices of such things as groceries, clothing, and highway tolls.

Cronyism

Much of the money that Mr. Obama has allowed to be created has gone directly into the coffers of the elite bankers, the richest people the world has ever seen. As I've just explained, this money has esentially been taken out of the pockets of blacks and given to whites.

While this is the most blatant example of cronyism, innumerable other examples abound, such as defense contractors and educational institutions. As with everything else government does, whatever the wording of the policies, what actually comes to pass is a product not of justice but of expediency: the powerful will do whatever they consider most beneficial. And while the powerful are not black, those who pay for cronyism are.

Unionization and the Minimum Wage

The banksters aren't the only privileged whites to benefit at the expense of blacks under Mr. Obamma's rule. While walking to work shortly after the election, I saw a headline on the Public Record, a union tabloid: "Obama Owes Unions Bigtime." Barry, Barry, he's their man.

While union rhetoric is intended to portray unions as the friends of the poor, the opposite is true, unless "friends don't let friends take low-paying jobs." The first law of the marketplace is that the higher the price for a good or service, the less of it will be demanded. An employer willing to hire X number of employees at five dollars per hour will hire fewer if forced to pay ten dollars per hour. This is good for those who get hired, of course, but not for those who can find no work.

Similarly, a worker might be willing to shuffle papers for five dollars an hour in a comfortable, friendly environment, but refuse to engage in heavy lifting in the cold and damp or scorching heat for the same wage. If it's fair for workers to refuse to work too long or too hard for low pay, it's fair for employers to refuse to hire at high mandated wages.

Like it or not, blacks are less likely to be hired than whites, and they have the same right to refuse work that demands too much for too little pay. The result is a higher unemployment rate for blacks.

The second law (or is it really the first?) is that only the worker can decide whether he is better off giving his time and effort for the money or looking for a more favorable exchange, and only the employer can decide whether to risk his capital on a given worker. Government-mandated wage scales, which includes both unions and minimum wages, take that choice from the workers and employers. Since lack of freedom to choose is the common definition of slavery, it is fair to say that Mr. Obama prefers a slave system to a free market. Given that whites disproportionately occupy positions of power relative to blacks, who is more likely to be the slave?

While it is true that some union members and minimum wage workers who are employed receive higher wages than they otherwise would, these benefit at the expense not only of workers whose skills will not attract a buyer at the minimum wage rate, but also those whose labor is worth more than the mandated union rate. The former, as I have said, are disproportionately black.

However, one would expect that the latter are also, since blacks generally have to be better workers than their white counterparts to overcome prejudice and be hired for the same job; also, employers have incentive to lower the wages of newer and better workers when they are forced to hire less-profitable workers. This is especially true when older workers, who would be disproportionately white, cannot be fired because of union tenure laws.

So privileged groups benefit from unionization and the minimum wage by pricing under-privileged workers, disproportionately blacks, out of the market and penalizing the hard workers who do break into the better jobs.

The War on Drugs

Candidate Obama dared his detractors to use his past marijuana use against him by looking them in the eye and saying, "Of course I inhaled. That's the whole point." He might as well have added, "What are you going to do about it?"

Though he was trying to appear sincere by distancing himself from Bill Clinton's and George W. Bush's dissembling about their drug use, he thereby proved himself a breathtaking hypocrite: he admits to having used marijuana himself and has paid no penalty for it, but he has no compunction about jailing others who do so. Similarly, he is willing to play the race card in the Trayvon Martin case but shows no remorse over murdering Abdulrahman Al-Awlaki, who was guilty of no crime, nor of presiding over a system in which the majority of violators of drug laws are white but the majority of those in jail for violating drug laws are black; furthermore, they serve longer sentences than whites.

Drug-law conviction bars these "criminals" from good jobs, making them vulnerable to the hardships of unionization and the minimum wage. And again, as a group, this hurts blacks more than whites.

The Wars Overseas

The military, like the rest of society, is disproportionately white at the top and black at the bottom. Those who direct the war from their air-conditioned quarters are white; those out in the battle fields getting killed and maimed are black. These "volunteers" come from outside the inner circle and are driven into the killing business by the unemployment that follows unionization and the minimum wage, to say nothing of schools that do not teach and a welfare system that encourages single motherhood. These are the "heroes" honored by flyovers at football games and "Veterans Memorial Highway" signs. Maybe they think these honors make the risk and trauma worthwhile—as I say, only they can decide—but I suspect most don't. I wouldn't.

So there you have it.

Many blacks trust Mr. Obama because he has dark skin and frizzy hair, and their hearts are in it because he is the "President of the United States of America." With the office comes trust. But is he, as president, worthy of that trust? Should blacks want their president to be that man, or someone else?

If I were black, I would want a president who promotes honest money and the rights of prospective employers and employees to interact, and who will end cronyism, the war on drugs and the wars overseas. There is someone in the political arena who has been working hard to do do all that for thirty years, and it's not Barack Obama. If you don't know who it is, you need to find out.